LOVE SET FREE

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1050, 14 August 1930, Page 5

LOVE SET FREE

COPYRIGHT

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

L.G.MOBERLY.

Author of Cloanamc Firee,” “In Apple Blomooi Time,” "Thread* of Life." etc.

CHAPTER IV'. (Continued). He spoke the last words with marked slowness and emphasis, and as the sense of them reached Robertear, he shrank back, his face suddenly becoming ashen. “Holt?” he said, falteringly, “What have you Jieard from Holt?” “You know as well as I do what I am likely to have heard from him," was the reply, full of significance, while Dashwood’s glance raked the other’s face. “Repeated to the world it will make an ugly story, a very ugly story.” The big man seemed to wilt visibly. “It was as if,” Dashwood said long afterward, “a blown-out balloon had all at once collapsed.” The mau’s flabby face was livid; fear looked out of his eyes; his loose lips sagged, but he tried to recover his jaunty manner, tried, and lamentably failed. “Holt is very ill, so you said. I-Ie was probably delirious when he to’d you what you call an ugly storyfairy tales, no doubt.” “He was not delirious, and the story was not a fairy tale, and you know it. Holt is a sick man, a very sick man, but there were no signs of delirium about him when he told me what he did tell me. I think,” he smiled grimly, “I think if I made public all that he told me, you would find yourself in Queer Street, if not somewhere even more unpleasant, Mr. Robertson. Need we go on beating about the bush? I have delivered my ultimatum. you know my terms. Give me, in writing, the undertaking I ask, and what Holt has told me shall go no further. Refuse what I ask, and all I learnt from your friend will be public property at once. It is up to you to make your choice.” There was almost a murderous gleam in Robertson’s eyes. If hate could have killed, Francis Dashwood would that moment have been a dead man. But the doctor’s estimate of the big bully in front of him had been a just one. Robertson was not only a bully, he was also a coward, an arrant coward; and the steady look in the eyes that watched him, with the certainty that the doctor possessed all the knowledge which he professed to possess, weakened hie powers of resisting, made his heart within him as water. His petty soul shrivelled and shrank before the other man’s uprightness; under the gaze of those steady eyes which seemed to see his every thought. “You have got me at a disadvantage, a mean disadvantage. You know that I am powerless in your hands.” Dashwood’s cool, unperturbed smile was the only answer, and Robertson went on bitterly. “You have made a pawn of Holt, and now you are doing the same thing with me, making pawns of us both to suit your own euv.s.” “Need we prolong this discussion?” Dashwood asked, turning toward <the roll-top bureau which stood across the corner of the room. “I gather that you intend to fall in with my suggestion and sign the paper I propose you should sign.' Why make any more words about if? You are only wasting my time and your own." “Have it your own way,” the big man snapped out sullenly. “Pawns have no voice in these matters. They must be content to be moved without protest.” He sat down heavily in the seat at the bureau, and drew tow-ard him a blank sheet of paper. “Weil?" he asked, “what next? What do you propose I should write down for you? I conclude you have a cut-and-dried scheme?” “Oh, yes, I have a cut-and-dried scheme. I eame here with my scheme fully planned out.” was the calm rejoinder. “You will write what 1 dictate,”- ,

With the air of a sulky schoolboy, and with the slowest possible deliberation, Robertson picked up a pen. and with Dashwood standing just behind him, he wrote the words that the doctor dictated. “I undertake to refrain from persecuting or threatening Miss Judith Merivale in any way whatsoever. I will also see to it that nothing derogatory to her father or her father's honour shall ever be made public. To the best of my ability his memory shall be kept free from all reproach.” "Sign It,” Dashwood said peremptorily. “Sign, and I will witness it; and remember, if you fail to abide by w'hat you have written here, I shall consider myself at liberty to make whatever use I choose of Holt’s information.” CHAPTER XV. THE HORNBYS “What d say is, that I don’t hold with these grand fandangly doctors, dropping front Heaven knows where, and settling themselves in this neighbourhood. Eet them stay where they come from and leave our poor struggling G.P.’s alone. That’s what I say,” Mrs. Hornby said it in a high-pitched voice, which owed its shrillness to overstrained nerves; and Mrs. Hornby’s rather pinched face took on an expression of shrewishness which her latest “help” charitably put down to the same cause. Judith,.in her new capacity, found herself wrestling with innumerable tasks in the Hornby household, tasks as novel to her as they were uncongenial! She found herself, too, commiserating from the bottom of her heart all those who undertook the multifarious duties which seemed to fall to the lot of the “Mother’s Help”; and yet, from the bottom of her heart also she pitied Susan Hornby, the wife of the hard-worked general practitioner in this Dockland wilderness and, as Mrs. Hornby stopped speaking now, Judith looked at her with eyes full of sympathy. She and her employer were together in a square, badly-furnished room, which looked out Into a grey street, and although the window was open the felt lifeless and stale. "Has someone come down here to interfere with your husband’s work?” she asked, while with busy fingers she sorted from a gigantic work basket a no less gigantic pile of mending, and Mrs. Hornby banged about the sittingroom. She was ostensibly tidying the very untidy place, but she was actually only banging, and banging, with as much noise as can possibly be put into that operation. “Well, of course. Simon tells mo not to judge too quickly, and says wily should 1 imagine the man is going to harm him; but Simon’s always one to hold his hand, and wait and see. He’s far too tolerant and waiting—and—seeing, to please me. I’m not so patient as he is. I like to be up and doing straight away, setting things right without delay.” “Perhaps he thinks this new doctor will not really spoil his practice,” Judith said mildly, intent upon pouring oil on troubled waters. “There must surely be room in this crowded district for several doctors. Mr. Hornby may feel sure the new man won’t interfere with him.”

“Ah, he may think it, but that won’t make it be,” was the cryptic reply, “and don’t get me to believe in these men who come from nowhere and tell you nothing about themselves. I don’t believe in them. How do you know they are not frauds? We’ve -nothing but their word for it that they aren’t. Do you know what I call this Dr. Smith—Mr. Nobody from Nowhere, that’s what 1 call him, and that’s the way I look at turn, I’ve said, it over and oyer

Ito Simon. I’ve said it a. hundred I times: ‘Who is this Dr. Smith? Why | don’t you find out all about hint? Why do you sit down meekly and let him ride rough-shod over you?’ My goodness! I’ve said enough.” Judith suppressed a smile. Even her short acquaintance with Mrs. Hornby had taught her that what the doctor’s wife said once, she might safely be guaranteed to repeat a hundred times. It was one of Mrs. Hornbys idiosyncrasies! But the new help only replied tactfully: “Possibly Dr. Hornby will.manage to find out all about this Dr. Smith. ! It must be quite easy.” “Easy? Of course, it’s easy. I tell Simon so. ’Look him up in the Medical Register,’ I say, ‘Look him up. How do we know he isn’t an impudent impostor? How do we know he’s really a doctor? How do we know he’s here for any good at ail?” "Has he been here long?” "No, not very long, hut quite long enough to be getting lots of patients. They’re like silly sheep. If one goes after somebody new, they’U all follow. They think now there’s no one like this wonderful Dr. Smith.” "Is he so wonderful?” “Not to my way of thinking. He isn’t bad-looking,” Mrs. Hornby admitted this grudingly, “but. good gracious alive, there are plenty of goodlooking men in the world, and some of the best-looking are the worst villains,” she added darkly. "Well, you’ve only got to go to the pictures to know that! Or to read any really good thriller. The villain is pretty nearly always as handsome as—as Satan himself. so you can’t go by looks.” Judith seized on the last phrase in the incoherent remark, and answered that while Mrs. Hornby was getting breath to begin again. “No. of course one mustn’t judge anybody just by looks, though I do sometimes think a person's eyes and mouth do help one to realise their character.” “Oh this Dr. Smith has eyes that look into you like a gimlet, and you Can’t see his mouth, he has a beard, a little close-cut beard. But that tells us nothing. He may be some sort of low adventurer, even though ho certainly has good manners and a gentlemanly way with him. 1 don’t deny his manners are all right, but that’s nothing to go by. Lots of villains have good manners, that’s what 1 say. The wretched man has bewitched my husband; Simon is bewitched by him; there's no doubt about it in my mind.”

“Is he so very bewitching?” Judith inwardly smiled, though her face was demurely grave, and she darned with assiduity. “Depends on what you call bewitching? He has a brown beard. Oh, I told you he had a beard; and his eyes—well, he’s got eyes that sort of look through you; I told you that, too. gimlets his eyes are. But I don’t take any notice of his eyes.” She tossed her head a little. “What I’m thinking about is his coming down here at all, and stealing Simon’s practice. That’s what makes me wild, to have this man popping up from nowhere and taking Simon's work. But you might as well talk to the pump in the backyard as talk to Simon, when his mind’s once made up. I’ve talked till I was hoarse; I’ve talked till I was nearly black in the face; Simon pays no attention. He just goes his own way. There now, the kettle will be boil ing in a minute. Oh, my goodness, one wants 20 pairs of hands. One pair isn’t much use, what with the house and the children and the thousand things I have to do. Goodness, there’s never a chance to catch up." That was true enough, Judith re fleeted. Mrs. Hornby was perpetually trying to catch up the time she could never overtake; the tasks she never either began or finished at the righl moment. The poor lady seemed to be always engaged in a breathless effort which was never a successful one. Judith made her way to the kitener behind the sitting room to see that the kettle did not boil over. She felt with a certain ruefulness that a few extra heads might be of value to Mrs Hornby, as well as those 20 pairs of hands. Her own brain swam. She found the almost incessant conversa

iion, complaints, lamentations or objurgations of her employer harder to endure than the actual work, though that was hard and'unceasing, an endless chain of daily rounds and common tasks, as she whimsically put it to herself. Not only was the actual work strange and wearying, but brought up as she had been in the heart of the country, in a peaceful land of down and meadow and woodland, Judith was often oppressed by the greyness, the sordidness, of her present surroundings, and Alison’s cheery courage was to her a never-ending source of surprise and admiration. “I don’t know how you bear the all-prevailing sameness of it all,” she had said once to Alison. “The houses all the same height; the endless, end less grey streets; the eternal poverty and misery all round. How do you manage to smile and seem happy?’* “It isn’t seeming—I am happy,*’ was the response. “I love my work; I love my dear, wonderful East Enders; I even love the grey streets. And there are green corners among them, bits of trees here, a church-yard where there is grass over there between the houses, the river just beyond. There are little compensations for us, even here!” The words cheered Judith at the time, and they cheered her now, cs she went back to the sitting-room to clear her mending from the table and lay the tea. The Hornbys’ house- — too small for its overflowing family; a house hard to keep clear, almost impossible to keep tidy; set in a grim street of houses like itself. To Judith it sometimes felt like a cage from which escape was impossible. The Hornby children, fond though she normally w'as of children, fretted her nerves to breaking point. They poured into the room now 1: an overflowing stream, and Judith foresaw that any tidying recently done would soon be swamped by that stream! “I believe I am getting old and nervy,” she said to Alison, whom she met that same evening, when after tea she went out to try and find some fresh air. “I feel sometimes as if I should like to scratch somebody, or break something. Do you know that scratchy feeling?” Alison smiled her heartening smite, the smile which had so tonic an effect upon Judith. (To bo continued tomorrow.)